This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: An unintended consequence, and an explanation Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

I've been wondering for awhile about some of the referer spam I get - the links either point nowhere, or they point to an "account closed" type of page. This was baffling before I ran across this eweek story - it's an unintended consequence of the CAN-SPAM act:

One troublesome technique finding favor with spammers involves sending mass mailings in the middle of the night from a domain that has not yet been registered. After the mailings go out, the spammer registers the domain early the next morning.

By doing this, spammers hope to avoid stiff CAN-SPAM fines through minimal exposure and visibility with a given domain. The ruse, they hope, makes them more difficult to find and prosecute.

The scheme, however, has unintended consequences of its own. During the interval between mailing and registration, the SMTP servers on the recipients' networks attempt Domain Name System look-ups on the nonexistent domain, causing delays and timeouts on the DNS servers and backups in SMTP message queues.

I think I'm seeing a variation on that - either the new domain isn't up when I see the ref, or the domain has been taken back down. This is getting to be like the old "Spy vs. Spy" routine in Mad magazine. How much damage are these bozos doing to the network commons? Here's a thought:

"We have to figure out how to taper DNS services gracefully rather than having catastrophic failures," said Paul Mockapetris, the author of the first DNS implementation and chief scientist at Nominum Inc., based in Redwood City, Calif. "Mail look-up was the first application put on top of DNS after I designed it, and I was so excited to see that. And now, 20 years later, people are trying to figure out how to stop doing mail look-up on DNS. It's bizarre."